Henry Taber

Henry Taber (1860–1936) was an American mathematician.

Biography Taber studied mechanical engineering at Sheffield Scientific School from 1877 to 1882. Then, he went to Baltimore to study mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, under Charles Sanders Peirce and William Edward Story. He was awarded a doctorate in 1888, with a dissertation most likely tutored by Story.

The following year he was assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, but in 1889, on Clark University's foundation hiring his teacher and friend, Story, he went also to Clark. Both remained at Clark as mathematics professors until retirement in 1921.

His brother, Robert Taber, was a well known Broadway theatre actor.

Taber popularized linear algebra as expressed with matrices, in particular the symmetric matrix, skew-symmetric matrix, and orthogonal matrix.

Works The papers by Henry Taber have been listed by Bibliographica Hopkinsiensis 1890: On the Theory of Matrices, American Journal of Mathematics 12: 337 via HathiTrust 1891: "On certain Identities in the Theory of Matrices", American Journal of Mathematics 13 1891: "On the application to matrices of any order of the quaternion symbols S and V", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 22 1891: "On certain properties of symmetric, skew-symmetric and orthogonal matrices", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 22 1891: "On the matrical equation φ Ω = Ω φ", Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 18 1891: "On a theorem of Sylvester's relating to non-degenerate matrices", Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 19 1892: "Note on representation of orthogonal matrices", Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 19 1893: "On real orthogonal substitution", Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 20 1893: "On the linear transformations between two quadrics", Journal of the London Mathematical Society 24 1894: "On orthogonal substitutions that can be expressed as a function of a single alternate (or skew-symmetric) substitution", American Journal of Mathematics 16

The list above is not exhaustive, however. For instance, Taber had also published the following paper:

1896: "On the group of linear homogeneous transformations whose invariant is a bilinear form", The Mathematical Review 1(1): 154-168